On November 9, 2010, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin visited the hospital in Ivanovo where Khrenov works in cardiology. Then days ago, Khrenov was selected as one of the questioners in Putin’s latest installment of his annual propaganda festival, where he pretends to respond to issues phoned in by ordinary citizens. But Khrenov threw Putin a curve ball, and departed from the pre-arranged script to ask Putin whether he was aware that his visit to the hospital had been rigged, a total sham, a Potemkin village designed to deceive.

Hundreds of adopted children, most of them Russian, have come here to northwest Montana to live and perhaps find healing grace with the horses and cows and rolling fields on Joyce Sterkel’s ranch. Some want to return to the families that adopted them, despite their troubles.

Others, like Vanya Klusyk, have seen far too much of what the world can dish out.

Like this:

With the Russian economy in tatters, Vladimir Putin needs a source of ready cash to continue his cold-war aggression. The Moscow Timesreports on his latest source:

While Washington plans to pump unprecedented sums into what critics call a government takeover of health care, Moscow is moving in the opposite direction by backing legislation that could force hospitals and other public institutions to go commercial or close.

A bill scheduled to be approved by the State Duma in a third and final reading Friday aims to overhaul the financing for medical, educational, cultural and scientific institutions by giving them for the first time a free hand in how they spend state subsidies.

But opponents warn that the “anti-socialist” reform also could lead to a drop in state subsidies, forcing hospitals, schools and even libraries to increase their numbers of paid services or reduce work hours so as to make ends meet. They say this free-market approach could ultimately hurt the population, especially in poor rural areas.

During his visit to Murmansk on Saturday, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin demonstrated his concern for the people by “spontaneously” popping into a pharmacy unannounced to see if Arbidol flu medicine was available and at what price.

Putin’s Arbidol visit was broadcast throughout the day and evening on national television news programs, which will surely boost the product’s sales more than the best advertising campaign could ever do.

Arbidol is made by Pharmstandard, with headquarters in the Moscow region. Why did Putin act as an advertising agency for the company, going out of his way in Murmansk to mention Arbidol by name?

Here is a short chronology of events behind Arbidol’s miraculous success:

A recent study by the British medical journal The Lancetreveals that 34 of every 100,000 Russian women who give birth lose their lives in the effort.

That figure ranks Russia a stunning #62 out of 181 world nations studied, behind Ukraine and just barely ahead of Georgia. Bulgaria, Romania and Estonia all have far lower rates of maternal mortality than Russia, and Russia’s rate is more than double — that’s right, more than double — that of the United States.

Russia’s rate of maternal mortality has improved over the past couple of decades, but that means absolutely nothing because it’s merely part of a worldwide trend and Russia’s rate of improvement lags far behind the world’s pace. Russia’s rate fell 1.9% per year, but that was easily exceeded by places like Dominican Republic and Papua New Guinea and Haiti. Russia’s rate of improvement places it a shocking #98 on the list of 181 nations.

Let’s repeat that: more than half of all world nations did better than Putin’s Russia in decreasing their rate of maternal morality. Combine that with the fact that one Russian woman is murdered outright by her husband every 30 minutes, and you have an abject disaster for which there is only one proper descriptive term: holocaust.

In today’s special issue, we argue once again that Russia must be divested of the 2014 Olympic Games. A jaw-dropping recent report in the Moscow Times newspaper highlights the innumerable social problems that plague Russia, problems from which the Olympics is diverting essential resources at the cost of Russian lives.

The mighty MT reports that Dr. Leonid Lazebni, the Russian Surgeon General, announced that Russian children face a “catastrophe” because, in Moscow at least, three out of four boys and two out of three girls smoke cigarettes. This contrasts with an overall smoking rate in the capital city of 24.6%.

These figures are truly shocking, of course, but even more stunning was the Keystone Cops manner in which the utterly clueless Lazebni made his presentation and in which the assembled government officials responded.

According to Ilya Dashkovsky of the Russian publication Krestyanskiye Vedemosti and other sources cited by the ever-brilliant Paul Goble in a recent post, in 1990, as the Soviet economy collapsed into ruin, an average Russian consumed 75 kilograms of meat. Today, he consumes 61.

According to Dashkovsky, in 1990 such a Russian consumed 387 kilograms of milk products, but today it’s just 247 kilograms.

Then, 297 eggs. Now, 256.

Russians are replacing these key proteins with bread, potatoes and sugar in order to maintain their body mass. The exclusion of basic food groups from the Russian diet leads to secret starvation and malnutrition.

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